Thursday, 11 February 2010

Training in a new venue

One of Scandals 'dislikes' is training in a new venue. Ok I'll rephrase - she's happy to train in a venue, providing she's not doing agility. She'll happily do heelwork (or our version of it :-)) or tricks, and she'll happily watch other dogs running, but doesn't have much interest in doing it herself. Last night I trained at Bincknoll and took Scandal in whilst we were setting up. Usually when I am setting up sequences/courses at home she'll be running round with the toy in her mouth like a mad thing, but yesterday all she wanted to do was sniff and try and find morsels of horse poo. Grrrr! Once everything was up, we did a couple of short sequences and Scandal was lovely - careful, but lovely. Then afterward we'd finished training Ann built a steeplechase course and Scandal got to have 2 go's at it :-) I broke it down into 3 sections as at the moment, especially in a new venue, I want to reward as much as poss, give her less chance to get anything wrong, and reward the great bits. Scandal was great and at the start of the course both times put herself into a sit without any commands from me, I'm really pleased with this as it's transferred nicely into agility from all our training around being a pet, ie sit before your lead comes off, sit before dinner, sit before you go through the door etc. She did lovely waits, 2 lovely cross behinds, responded really well to turning on my shoulders, and did a big go on round the arena and I layered most of it but she still went on really well, so I was dead chuffed :-)

I'm not expecting her to come out all guns blazing at 16/18 months, she's a lot stronger training at home, but anywhere else she is more careful, maybe because it's a different surface (last night was the first time she'd trained indoors) or because it's different equipment. Hopefully training in a few different places over the next few months will help. I can't wait for her to be out now, it is lovely working such a biddable and honest girlie :-)